Empire WatchAnalysis of current world affairs with focus on gloabal struggle for social and economic justice and against racism, war, imperialism and oppression much of it brought on by US Empire and its allies

Crimes Against Humanity And The Shameless Hypocrisy

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the massacre in Newtown, New England, where 26 children and educators were shot to death by a gun man. Meanwhile, CNN spent most of its time yesterday on a new shooting at a high school in Colorado where another heavily armed high school student shot and critically injured a 17 year old girl, before killing himself.

But, there was another massacre, just two days ago, by another evil psychopath, which didn’t get nearly as much coverage as either Newtown or yesterday’s shooting in Colorado: Obama authorized a drone attack that killed 17 and injured 30 innocent people at a wedding party in Yemen. And, then, yesterday, as if nothing had happened, he walked into the Map room of the White House, lit 26 candles for the 26 people killed in Newtown, and made a statement to the media to show how much he values human life!

The US history is full of evil cold blooded mass murderers and war criminals as presidents and other top officials; so, Obama is not alone, but what makes him worse than all the others is that he, for the first time in US history, has made it official US policy to go after and assassinate anyone and any group of individuals, wherever they may be, whichever country they may be a citizen of, and whoever they may be in the company of, at the time the hellfire missile is fired. Not only does he act like judge, jury and executioner, and not only does he order the execution without any evidence or trial, but, he’s decided on his own, that his jurisdiction is the entire world. This may have been done by other presidents before, but it was never an openly admitted and official policy, and was never to this magnitude and frequency. The fact that he’s the “first black president” seems to have given him a blank check to commit all the vile acts and mass murder he wants, without any serious criticism from those who hated and protested Bush’s policies.

And what’s more, no one – no other president before him – ever came close to him in hypocrisy, lies and deceit. It’s impossible to be indifferent towards one massacre and genuinely get teary eyed about another. You either are moved and pained by children getting killed or you’re not. When Israel was bombing densely populated Gaza and massacring people indiscriminately, with no way for Gazans to defend themselves, he said coldly and with no emotion: “Israel has the right to defend itself”, and followed up with increasing US military aid to the apartheid regime. Then, when Mandela died, he said that when he was young he used to read Mandela’s speeches and was inspired by his struggle against “apartheid”. This is why I say Obama is worse than even Dick Cheney. The man would lie to get what he wanted which was war and war crimes and he didn’t care about any struggle against any apartheid, but had no pretense about who he was and what he wanted. And even if he tried to pretend, he couldn’t. Obama can and does it all the time.

To be sure, it was truly heart breaking to learn about those innocent children killed in Newtown, but, if we don’t also feel heartbroken about families blown to pieces by US drones overseas, and moreover, if we don’t get enraged and outraged that a sitting president should commit such mass murders with impunity on behalf of the Empire, it’s time to question our humanity. And if we don’t see that this man has absolutely no principle or decency and all he wants to do is continue Empire’s policies and make his billionaire bosses happy, then we should question our most basic intelligence.